The following endowed chair elections were made by the Cornell Board of Trustees at its meetings June and November of 2003 and January of 2004.
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The McClintock professorships honor the Cornell graduate (1923 B.S. in plant breeding and botany, 1925 M.A. and 1927 Ph.D. in plant genetics) who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. Faculty members are selected for the McClintock professorship for their path-breaking research that opens new areas of discovery. With election of Lis to the chair, there are now two McClintock professors at Cornell.
Lis has been a member of the Cornell faculty since 1978, when he joined the former Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology as an assistant professor. Lis focuses his research on mechanisms of gene regulation in two model organisms, the Drosophila fruit fly and brewers yeast, and he teaches a course on the molecular biology of eukaryotic nuclei (The Nucleus). His research program has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, including a MERIT Award, March of Dimes, American Cancer Society, Cornell Biotechnology Institute and a Procter and Gamble University Exploratory Research Grant. Lis won a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship award.
He earned a B.S. in chemistry (1970) at Fairfield University, a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1975) at Brandeis University and was a postdoctoral fellow (1975-78) at Stanford University. He was promoted to full professor at Cornell in 1991.
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June B. Nasrallah, professor with indefinite tenure in the Department of Plant Biology, was elected a Barbara McClintock Professor, effective Feb. 1, 2004.
Nasrallah studies plant reproductive biology and signal transduction, and her research has helped to unlock some secrets of plant cell communication. The focus of her research is self-incompatibility, a process that prevents plant inbreeding and promotes out-crossing (fertilization from another plant) and variability. She and her colleagues were among the first to identify a receptor-ligand system for plant cell-to-cell communication and to identify the gene that tells a plant's stigma receptors which pollen to accept or reject. Her research also has led to insights that explain the evolution of inbreeding, which in the long run could enable genetic engineers to more easily hybridize improved varieties of plants.
Nasrallah earned her bachelor's degree from the American University of Beirut in 1971 and her Ph.D. in genetics from Cornell in 1977. She served as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell until 1985, when she became an assistant professor and then a full professor in 1997. She has served on the editorial board of the journal Sexual Plant Reproduction since 1988 and was associate editor of the journal Plant Physiology from 1995 to 1998. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in May 2003.
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Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor with indefinite tenure in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, was appointed the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, Feb. 1, 2003, and was granted indefinite tenure effective Feb. 1, 2004.
The professorship was established in honor of Howard Edward Babcock, a Cornell trustee who died in 1950, to provide leadership for policy-related research linking human nutrition with food and agriculture systems.
Pinstrup-Andersen's academic focus is research, teaching and interaction with policy-makers on food and nutrition policy, with emphasis on policies to improve the global food system for the benefit of nutritional status of low-income people. He served as the director of the Cornell Food and Nutrition Policy Program and professor of food economics at Cornell from 1987 until 1992, when he left to become the general director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI ) for the next 10 years. In 2001, he won the World Food Prize for his contribution to agricultural research, food policy and uplifting the status of the poor and starving citizens of the world.
Pinstrup-Andersen earned a B.S. in agricultural economics from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark in 1965 and an M.S. and Ph.D., both in agricultural economics, in 1967 and 1969, respectively, from Oklahoma State University. He holds honorary degrees from Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University in India, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in Switzerland, the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, and the Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is an honorary professor at the Tashkent State University in Uzbekistan and a distinguished professor at Wageningen University.
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Ray Wu, professor with indefinite tenure in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, has been elected as a Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor, effective Feb. 1, 2004.
The Liberty Hyde Bailey Professorship was established in 1972 to honor the former Cornell agriculture college dean (1903-13) who elevated the study of horticulture to a science and helped develop the extension system to disseminate practical knowledge about agriculture to farmers. The professorship recognizes distinguished faculty members who have national or international reputations in agriculture and related sciences. With Wu's election, there are now nine Bailey professors at Cornell.
A member of the faculty since 1966, when he joined the former Section of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as an associate professor, Wu focuses his research on developing transgenic rice plants with agronomically useful genes. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Peking University, an honorary professor at 10 other universities in China and as an honorary research scientist at major research institutes in South Korea and China.
He currently is serving on the editorial boards of Methods and Cell Research. He has served as editor or co-editor for nine volumes of the Recombinant DNA book in the "Methods in Enzymology" series between 1979 and 1993. From 1976 to 1979 he was chair of the Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology at Cornell. Wu won a Frank Annunzio Award in science and technology in 2002 and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He earned his B.S. in chemistry (1950) at the University of Alabama and his Ph.D. in biochemistry (1955) at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Susan E. Linn Sage Professorships were established in 1890 by Henry W. Sage, who was chairman of the Cornell Board of Trustees from 1875 until his death in 1897. The professorships and later the Sage School of Philosophy were named for his late wife. His other gifts to Cornell include an earlier professorship; Sage College, a dormitory for the first women who were admitted to Cornell; and Sage Chapel, a church for nondenominational services.
Boyd specializes in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He also is interested in ethics, in social and political philosophy, especially Marxism, and in the philosophy of biology. Noted for being an energetic and innovative teacher, he came to the Sage School faculty in 1972, after teaching at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of California-Berkeley. He earned his S.B. in mathematics in 1963 and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1970, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Boyd has published seminal papers on such topics as materialism, reductionism and scientific realism. He has broad inter-disciplinary interests. For example, he has team-taught a seminar with an entomologist. He introduced a highly innovative and interdisciplinary course on Darwin, Social Darwinism and Human Sociobiology (Philosophy 286).
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Alice Fulton, professor with indefinite tenure in the Department of English, has been elected the Ann S. Bowers Professor in English, effective Feb. 1, 2004. Fulton is the first holder of the new professorship, named for Ann S. Bowers '59, a member of the Cornell Board of Trustees since 1996.
Bowers endowed the professorship to be used in support of a faculty member in the Cornell English department's Creative Writing Program.
Fulton, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2001, was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress for her book Felt, named the most distinguished book of poems written by an American in 2001-02. She has received a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and her work has appeared in six editions of The Best American Poetry series.
Fulton received a B.A. from Empire State College, Albany, in 1978 and earned a master of fine arts degree at Cornell in 1982. She was a professor of English at the University of Michigan for 18 years before returning to Cornell, where she assumed the faculty position left vacant by the late A.R. Ammons, Fulton's former mentor, who died in 2001.
Bowers serves as co-chair of the Academic Affairs and Campus Life Committee and as a member of the Executive Committee and the Alumni Affairs and Development Committee. She has also been a member of the Trustee Task Force on Residential Communities and the Subcommittee on Tenure and Named Chairs. She serves as a Cornell Silicon Valley Adviser and is a member of the Presidents Council of Cornell Women.
Recognized as a Foremost Benefactor of Cornell in 1995, Bowers also has endowed the Robert N. Noyce Professorship in Life Sciences and Technology, the Robert N. Noyce Directorship of Engineering Communications, and she has supported the Academic Excellence Workshops in the College of Engineering. A staunch supporter of scholarships and financial aid at Cornell, Bowers has established the Ann S. Bowers Scholarship Fund to benefit the colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering, the Bowers Cornell Presidential Research Scholarship and the Ann Schmeltz Bowers Noyce Cornell Tradition Fellowship.
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The IBM chair was established at Cornell in 1962 with a grant specifying it be given to an eminent faculty member in the College of Engineering. It was the first corporate-sponsored chair at Cornell.
Hopcroft's research centers on theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, automata theory and graph algorithms. He has co-authored four seminal textbooks with Jeffrey D. Ullman and Alfred V. Aho. His most recent work is in the area of information capture and access.
He is a graduate of Seattle University and has an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. After three years on the faculty of Princeton University, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1967, was named professor in 1972 and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science in 1985. He was chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1987 to 1992 and was the associate dean for college affairs in 1993. From 1994 to 2001, he served as the Joseph Silbert Dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell.
Hopcroft has served on numerous advisory boards including the Air Force Science Advisory Board, NASA's Space Sciences Board and National Research Council's Board on Computer Science and Telecommunications. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association of Computing Machinery. In 1992 President Bush appointed him to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, and he served through May 1998. From 1995 to 1998 he served on the National Research Council's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications. He was honored with the A.M. Turing Award in 1986.
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Keshav K. Pingali, professor with indefinite tenure in the Department of Computer Science, with joint appointments in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected as the India Professor of Computer Science, effective July 1, 2003.
He is the first person to hold the chair, which has been endowed by an anonymous benefactor of Cornell in India. The donor requested that the chair be given to a full professor in early or midcareer and that the holder travel periodically to India to lecture on computer science.
Pingali's research focuses on the improvement of compilers, the software that turns code written by programmers into machine language that can be executed by a computer. He and his research group work to create compilers that "optimize" the output so that programs run as fast as possible. Advances the group has made have been incorporated into software products from Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics and Digital Equipment Corp., among other companies.
Pingali earned a bachelor of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, in 1978, S.M. and E.E. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, and a doctorate in computer science from M.I.T. in 1986. He came to Cornell as an assistant professor in the fall of 1986.
He received the President's Gold Medal from IIT Kanpur in 1978, an IBM faculty Development Award in 1986, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator's award in 1989, an excellence in teaching award from the College of Engineering in 1997 and the Russell award from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He is director of Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science and was acting director of the Advanced Computing Research Institute, formerly a program within the Cornell Theory Center. He is now an associate director of the Theory Center.
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